"Something's Different This Year": Raese's Barnstorming Picking Up Steam in Special Election Race
By Huntingtonnews.net Staff
Republican U.S. Senate Candidate John Raese appears to thrive on the campaign trail, no matter how
grueling the schedule his people give him. They put Raese through the paces all over West Virginia
for the past two weeks, with their candidate attending everything from large Tea Party gatherings to
cookouts and talk radio interviews.
Raese says he's determined to go out and find likeminded West Virginians, wherever they are, who are ready for the federal government to be more accountable to the people. He is taking aim at the Obama Administration for hurting job growth and not standing up for traditional American values, including respect for the nation's military.
He's finding a growing audience across West Virginia if the growing crowds greeting him along his barnstorming tour are any indication. While he still likes to get around in his "Wally Wagon," a family van he uses for campaigning, he has also had to turn to a small plane as his schedule begins to pick up statewide. "You gotta do what you gotta do to meet the folks," says Raese, who heads up his family's limestone business in Morgantown.
Raese's critique of the Obama Administration's handling of the recession is perhaps his strongest punch. His probable Democratic opponent in this compressed special election for the remainder of Senator Byrd's old seat is Joe Manchin. As a Democrat, Manchin is yoked to Obama, for good or ill, through the November election.
Without even bringing up Manchin's name, Raese is able to rise above the partisanship that usually marks West Virginia's politics and leave Manchin explaining how he agrees, then disagrees with the President of his own party.
Perhaps the best news lately for Raese is that the all-important Independent vote is leaving Obama and the Congressional Democrats in droves nationally and presumably across West Virginia. This was a key constituency for the Democrats in 2008, as more Americans find Independent status more comfortable than one of the two traditional parties.
Raese's message--a private sector jobs emphasis and a shrunken role for the federal government in general--could attract many Independent voters in West Virginia. Kanawha County alone has over 10,000 registered Independents.
Raese has his work cut out for him, but he's been the only major candidate thus far in either party that has had such a pulsing campaign going every day since his announcement two weeks ago.
"Something's different this year. People sense where the energy is in a campaign," said Putnam County political consultant Jack Ellis, who had helped candidates in both parties in West Virginia. "If John Raese can get his message out there throughout the state by the end of August, it can catch fire with the stiff anti-Obama breeze blowing this fall. Don't forget: West Virginians voted down Barack Obama twice in 2008, and that was when he was at the height of his popularity nationally. How do you think West Virginians like him now?"